The Power of the Powerless

A wonderful essay on the nature of freedom, of becoming oneself in a society that does nothing else then serve itself. A bureaucracy that makes it impossible to live “in truth” with oneself.
This obviously has a very real bureaucracy in mind: The Soviet Union of the late 70's. But still remains relevant.

In responding to both the “West” and the “bloc” Vaclav encourages everyone to live “within the truth”.

The example he uses for a large part of the book is a greengrocer that receives a poster from the state that says: Workers around the world unite! The point he makes is that the greengrocer hangs this up above the storefront out of habit, not because he agrees with the statement, or has thought about what that would look like if the workers unite.
But in the world of the post-totalitarian regime of the Soviet he “ought” to do this. Now if he starts to think about it and refuses to hang this up, because he decides to live in the lie no longer, there is now a small revolt on the small scale.

Inevitably a regime like this must fall. Because it can't sustain original thought, or people freely expressing themselves. And that will cause conflict, be it open conflict (protest, revolt, or violence) or hidden conflict (meetings, congresses, sharing of pamphlets, educating each other)

While the Soviet Union is long gone. The critique goes further than just that of Soviet politics. It also appeals to democratic societies that are being subdued or “drugged” or kept busy in the Brave New World sense. Are we living “in the truth” or “in the lie” in our own societies.

In a quotation from Patoçka, Havel says: the thing with responsibility is, that you carry it around wherever you go.

There is a lot more to say about the nature of technology and the “automatism”. But I'll leave it at this:
It is of great importance that the main thing - the everyday, thankless, and never-ending struggle of human beings to live more freely, truthfully, and in quiet dignity - never imposes any limits on itself, never be half-hearted, inconsistent, never trap itself in political tactics, speculating on the outcome of its actions or entertaining fantasies about the future. The purity of this struggle is the best guarantee of optimum results.




P.S. Some other interesting bits:
Our attention, therefore, inevitably turns to the most essential matter: the crisis of contemporary technological society as a whole, the crisis that Heidegger describes as the ineptitude of humanity face to face with the planetary power of technology.
Technology - that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of modern metaphysics - is out of humanity's control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction.

It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies. But this static complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex foci of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising,